What Your Signature Says About You

Your Signature Reveals A Lot About You, New Study Says

Long Story Short

Your signature could give away what kind of person you are, according to a new study, with bigger scrawls linked to people who exhibit "sociable dominance".

Long Story

If you want to know if your boss, new flatmate or Tinder match is a narcissist, there’s a very simple way to find out, according to a new study. All you need to do is look at their signature.

Of course, the bad news is that they can look at yours, too.

Researchers studied the signatures of 500 chief financial officers, and measured them against several personality traits, including aggressiveness, social dominance, self-esteem and competitiveness. They also controlled for the size of people’s names.

They found that those with the biggest signatures were more likely to be liberal with the truth, and misreport a company’s earnings. They found a link between signature size and social dominance in men and women, as well as narcissism – but the latter only really applied to women.

The researchers, psychologists from Uruguay, the Netherlands and Curaçao, argued that they were only looking at signatures, and not handwriting in general, because signatures are more personal, and are a form of self-expression. But the study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, isn’t the only one of its kind.

A previous study from 1988 backs up these findings. Researchers found that women who underlined their signatures and added exclamation marks were more narcissistic.

And a study from 2013, researchers measured the signatures of more than 600 CEOs, over a decade’s worth of annual reports. They found that CEOs with bigger signatures were more likely to have an inflated sense of self and a disregard for other people's interests.

By contrast, people with small signatures are thought to more reserved, while people with illegible signatures are believed to be more private.